Easily Share Free Books With Your Friends Using Ownshelf

Browse the books your friends are reading – or share collections with your friends. You and your friends can download the books to read later. It’s called Ownshelf and it’s intended to be a way for friends to share freely distributable books.

It’s possible to use this to distribute copy-written material – because of encryption, Ownshelf wouldn’t even necessarily know you were doing so. This is not the intended use of the app, however: it’s supposed to be a way for people to share works in the public domain or otherwise free to spread.

“We promote and provide books that are public domain or creative commons. Of course what users actually upload to their personal shelf is up to them,” said founder Rick Marazzani, according to the article. “We hope that by using real names and real friends via Facebook that people will stick to what they deem as fair use. All the content on the server is encrypted, so we cannot see what’s in the user’s files. So we could not manage DRM or rights centrally.”

So this is a great tool that may or may not end up being abused by pirates – much like the Internet itself. But enough background: let’s see just how Ownshelf works.

Your Online Bookshelf

Head to OwnShelf.com to get started. You’ll need a Facebook account to log in; there is unfortunately no email-only option. When you do log in you’ll be presented with an empty shelf and the ability to browse your friends’ books. If none of your friends use OwnShelf (likely) you’ll still see three sets of books to browse: the shelves of Paulo Coelho and MC Lars alongside a collection of books that later turned into movies. Feel free to browse these collections to discover how the site looks.

If you “Borrow” the book it will show up on your “Books” page, along with any EPUB files you’ve uploaded to the service yourself (more on uploading later).

Click any of the books and you’ll be given the opportunity to download them as EPUB files.

You can easily add these books to your iPad or iPhone using iTunes, or add them to any e-reader that natively supports EPUB files (Kobo, Nook). If you want to send this file to your Kindle Nook or just about any e-reader on the market, try Calibre. We offer a free Calibre manual if you need help.

Uploading Books

You can upload books from the “Books” page of OwnShelf; the button for doing so is right at the top. You’ll be able to browse your computer and add as many EPUB files as you like.

Want some books to upload? Why not grab free EPUB versions of our many manuals? They are free to download and to distribute. I uploaded a bunch of them to Ownshelf; you could too and share the information we offer with friends quickly and easily.

Benjamin Flanders

January 30, 2013

That looks so much like owncloud, an open source personal server, that I have to believe that they just modified it and put it on their own servers. There might be an add on for owncloud for this exact thing now. I have to check this out.